The Sermons from the Stove series are sermons, inspirations, and insights ChaotishRabe gained while cooking in his kitchen at home.
It was after my first year in college when I first started becoming aware of how useful a skill like cooking was. Up until that point, it had been sufficient enough for me to follow the directions on the back of a microwaveable meal, and that was when I wasn’t at the university cafeteria or student center. I had recently moved off campus into a real cheap apartment with my wife.
Shortly after I moved off campus, my wife went home for the summer to visit her family, so I was really on my own, figuring it out. Sliced bread with peanut butter gets old quickly, so I bought a box of mac and cheese, and item which I had to have my niece (who is 1 year younger) make for me during Spring Break when I visited home, and rightfully, laughed in my face while cooking it.
I must’ve read the instructions over and over again. Reader, did you have a similar experience to mine? Water boiling over, getting all over the stove only for the noodles to be undercooked. It was a bitter dinner. But as with everything, with focus comes knowledge, with knowledge comes wisdom.
This sermon could easily be about self-development in adversity, but really I want to touch on the doors that opened for me, once I learned how to boil water properly. Boiling water, is just one of those FUNDAMENTAL cooking techniques that once learned, spirals your development upward and lends itself to adjacent meals. After I learned how to boil water, not only could I make mac and cheese, but also pastas, rice, oat meal, and other seemingly simple meals.
If you’ve made it through that long winded story, I wanted to ask you, Jedi, what are the fundamentals that are important to you, and continually sustain you and your practice? Is it meditation? Is it working out? Wholesome eating? Ritual? Your fundamentals can be numerous in as much the same way as one single cooking technique can’t create everything effectively. (I mean, I guess you can boil a steak, but I do prefer one off the grill). As we know from the ninth maxim “…that beliefs become thoughts, thoughts become words, words become actions, actions become habits, habits become values, and values determine destiny.”
We reap what we sow. What kind of destiny do you want to cultivate?
I encourage you to always look at your collection of fundamentals and identify which move you forward, and if there are any that can be replaced because they are no longer useful and if you have the time and mind, share which of your fundamentals influence you below.
